To sustain a serious yet insidious injury. The victim is unaware until informed by others.

The Wizard of Oz refers to "the kitchen took a slitch" which means the whole house was lifted off the ground and thrown right back to the ground after traveling some distance, (whether a real or imagined distance), by a tornado, and the extent of the damage is not really appreciated until the munchkins sing about it. "The kitchen took a slitch". During the movie, we assumed that the kitchen, in Dorothy's house was just fine, even though it had sustained the damage caused by a tornado. After all, we are American Movie Fans, and we leave our logical brains at the door. Most of us never even heard the reference to "slitch" nor, if we did hear and understand that word, nor did we ever suscribe this element of insidiousness to it, if we did understand what "slitch" meant.

This word appears in one of the songs in the movie "The Wizard of Oz" which describes how the cyclone dropped Dorothy's house onto the Wicked Witch of the East and killed her. It appears to denote some kind of unusual physical movement. An excerpt from the lyrics follows.

"The house began to pitch
The kitchen took a slitch
It landed on the wicked witch
in the middle of a ditch
Which
was not a healthy sitch-uation
for the wicked witch."